Sharita Hanley
Although he’s one of the world’s finest designers, Valentino Garavani’s original plan was simple. He wanted to design beautiful gowns for wealthy, beautiful women. For more than 50 years, Valentino has made his dream come alive. Simply known as “Valentino,” the Italian courtier's luxurious designs are a common thread for a vast range of famous women including Elizabeth Taylor, Iman, Adele, Audrey Hepburn, Serena Williams, Princess Diana, Naomi Campbell, Jennifer Lopez, Zoe Saldana and even Jackie Kennedy. Despite their various personalities, backgrounds and careers, Valentino’s designs highlight two things that bind them altogether: they are beautiful, wealthy women serving as living trademarks of Valentino’s A-list designs.
With more than 65 million views just five days after its release, Donald Glover’s “This is America,” has the internet buzzing. The video, which has been repeatedly called “genius, shows Glover as his alter ego “Childish Gambino” dancing with a group of African children while violent, terroristic and war-like incidents are taking place all around them.
Left open-ended and with little resolve, the video ends with Gambino running from the madness as a mob chases him (which resembles a scene in Jordan Peele’s Get Out). It’s jarring and disturbing yet intriguing and compelling as well. The lyrics, like the video, tell a story of complicated contrasts. There are parties and guns, guerilla warfare and dancing, high-class consumerism and contraband, all in one video. “What Gambino put together is a true picture of America where so many of us get to dance and sing and laugh and create,” journalist Isaac Bailey of CNN explained. “All the while others are largely ignored and trapped in the background, struggling and sometimes dying in a sea of ugliness that many of us would rather not acknowledge, knowing it would ruin the pretty pictures we’d rather focus on.” Evoking the transformative power of art and dance, Glover as Childish Gambino puts America on display and instead of home of the free and the brave, we’ve become home of the ying and the yang.
Just four months after leaving her dream job, Georgia Dawkins celebrated the release of her first book, Everybody Knows: The Power of Being in Position. Although she’d only been the Producer at Sister Circle Live (a daily talk show on mission to inspire and empower black women) for seven months, she knew it was time to move on. “The entire process was just so spiritual. God had been telling me [to leave] for months, but I was afraid,” she told me as cars zipped past the coffeehouse with the same zeal and purpose she had in her eyes. “Afraid of failing. Afraid of being broke and afraid of what people might think,” she explained. But when I saw her again just two weeks later as she sat in front of an excited audience at The Vault Art Gallery on April 22, 2018, reading excerpts from her memoir, there was no fear, failure or poverty to be found. Instead, there was purpose. The very purpose Dawkins has been chasing her entire life.
